Palm Beach County tried to keep PGA of America headquarters

By Brian Biggane Special to The Post

Wednesday

Dec 5, 2018 at 9:02 AMDec 5, 2018 at 9:02 AM

Kelly Smallridge, CEO of the Business Development Board of Palm Beach County, has known for the past two years that the PGA of America had outgrown its Palm Beach Gardens headquarters and was looking for an alternative.

In the end, Smallridge said Tuesday, “It simply was very hard to compete with the Frisco package.”

The Dallas suburb made it official Tuesday when the Frisco City Council approved a proposal to build a new headquarters, two championship golf courses and a teaching facility on a 600-acre parcel of land. About 120 of the 220 PGA of America employees will be based there upon its scheduled completion in late 2020 or early 2021.

Smallridge said she had three employees working on the retention project and also brought in the City of Palm Beach Gardens, Palm Beach County government officials, the public/private partnership Enterprise Florida and the governor’s office.

“So we did not leave anything on the table as far as making sure we were able to put forward solutions to the requirements they had," she said. "But access to an international airport like Dallas-Fort Worth, middle of the country, numerous direct flights daily, attracting millennials, the great real estate package they received, the golf course they’re going to be able to construct in the vicinity of their corporate headquarters … it was very hard to put together a package in a county that doesn’t have a tremendous amount of real estate in that size.”

Smallridge said the fact the efforts were to retain employees rather than add new ones made for “kind of an unfair playing field” because economic development leaders don’t normally work in that direction.

“Just imagine if PGA of America got an incentive to stay, how many calls our organization would receive from everybody else that all of a sudden is looking to leave our county,” Smallridge said.

Smallridge did take satisfaction that the organization will continue to have a presence of about 100 employees at its current location.

“We are the ‘Golf Capital of the World,’ we have a major artery named after them in PGA Boulevard, they have made a significant contribution to our county, and we’re very, very sorry we did not win this deal.”

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